What we ache for

“In creative work we seek to add our consciousness to what the world offers to us in ways that create new stories, images, and sounds that reveal insights, patterns and truths we may not have seen before. But to do this we have to be able to get our conditioned responses- the belief, for instance, that water should necessarily be depicted in paintings as blue- out of the way so we can see the fullness of the world within and around us. This is harder to do than we might think. From our earliest childhood we have been taught to see in mutually agreed upon ways. When my eldest son, Brendan, was in junior kindergarten his teacher asked his father and I to come in for an interview to discuss Brendan's perfunctory participation in classroom art projects. Mystified, I packed up several pieces of artwork Brendan had done at home and went to the school. The teacher, clearly frustrated with Brendan, showed us picture after picture that he had drawn in school in response to directions she had given the class. When she'd asked the students to draw a picture of the place they lived he had drawn the outline of a black box with a red triangle on top. Beside the "house" was a green ball atop the brown stick of a tree trunk. A yellow ball in the upper corner was presumably the sun. All the pictures he had drawn at school had clearly been done quickly and without much thought or care. I spread out one of the pictures from home on the teacher's desk. Every inch of the paper to the edges and corners was crowded with images at different angles, in a multitude of colors and with little or no regard for the laws of gravity. There were kings with gold crowns at the top of the page and huge birds flying through the air beneath them surrounded by multicolored forests and strange animals and people engaged in different activities.The teacher stared in disbelief at the contrast. "Well," she said at last, "clearly Brendan does not find my directions inspiring." I refrained from asking why she felt compelled to direct four year olds in creative expression. Was it important to evaluate them on their willingness to comply with another's way of seeing? Why not just turn them loose with paint and crayons and paper? She looked at Brendan's father and I with real concern. "Brendan," she stated emphatically, "is not going to do well in the public school system. He is not a team player. He does not care enough about what others think about what he does." His father and I, not as free of the desire to have others think well of us, suppressed our smiles.”

Read the rest of this excerpt from “What We Ache For”, by Oriah Mountain Dreamer.

http://www.oriahmountaindreamer.com/Books.html#ww

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